11 min read

I did it! I’ve coached 20 entrepreneurs in 7 cities in 4 months.

My mission was to give a boost to radically new, positive impact business during my 6 month sabbatical. In exchange for lunch I offered up my expertise, and met some talented and passionate people throughout the world. I coached and consulted freelancers, digital nomads, first time entrepreneurs and seasoned veterans, duos and teams of 100. We covered everything from leadership challenges and personal development to business development, branding, design and proposition development. It’s been an awesome ride.

3 MINUTE READ

Want high quality/low cost training for your firm? MOOCs may have the answer, but they are no quick fix.

Hailed as the next revolution in education, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are set to democratize access to learning, but the model still misses the personal touch needed to succeed in corporations.

3 minute read

Coworking is in danger of becoming mainstream.

Their numbers have grown dramatically every year since 2006 – in 2017 more than 1 million people will work in one. But their business model won’t scale and profits are low. Worst, their mainstream appeal may threaten their success.

Pieter Levels gives a bleak analysis of their business model – coworking spaces have low margins and don’t scale. Only 40% are profitable. He suggests looking at big pocketed corporates wanting to do remote work and get into the ‘free thinking’ vibe. These corporates would send teams to remotely build products and services in coworking spaces, and pay top dollar for it. But I doubt that this will work – it goes against the magic potion that makes coworking so effective. I don’t believe that just because a team of stiff corporates trade in their leather shoes for flip-flops and sunburns that they are going to transcend their old thought patterns and ways of working. Only immersion into a new culture can do that.

Every startup evolves – often unexpectedly. How do you manage this effectively?

How to transition from Free to Pay? How to take that thriving community and monetize it? How can you keep doors open to embrace all the potential but lock in what you need to move forward? And sometimes we just have an awesome business idea, something radically new. We don’t know how yet, but we feel it will work. In all these contexts, how to skillfully navigate this all the twists and turns so you can get to the best business? This article looks at one tool from design which can help improve your agility when you need to reconfigure your business.

I can appreciate the 80/20 rule, yet I think it’s outdated.

Sure, I accept that a first analysis will often show that 20% of inputs lead to 80% of outputs. I also agree that you can use this to sharpen your focus. But this analysis isn’t a catchall for every situation, and therefore hard to consistently put it into action on a daily basis. Most importantly it misses an opportunity for making really good use of your time – the potential to do things that multiply their effect over time.

Is leadership the starting point for new business? If so, then what does leadership look like starting from zero, from a blank slate?

In a recent working lunch in Vietnam, I was consulting 10 disabled artists seeking to start a new business as a collective. But they lacked a starting point. How to start their business? What to do first? How would the pieces come together? Collectively they had a rough vision for what the business should be, but no plan to put it into action. They were paralyzed.

I can’t deny that workaholics have serious impact, but should we emulate them?

I admire entrepreneurs, I think they will be the ones to make the necessary radical changes to the world viable – economical, culturally, environmentally. But it’s hard work, how to bring about change without losing balance in your own life? Does sacrificing your personal life like so many leaders (think Elon Musk, Steve Jobs) really change the world for the better?

You’ve got a massive business idea…worried about someone stealing it?

Farouk Meralli was bouncing new startup ideas off of me at rapid pace. Tantalizingly big ideas. I am bound to secrecy, but it got me thinking how often I meet entrepreneurs who feel nervous about sharing their ideas.

As a consultant it seems there are an increasing number of requests for non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) – just for initial conversations! Sure, NDAs have their place, you shouldn’t share patent worthy info without one, but you can’t build solid business ideas in isolation either. So how do you figure out what to share?

So you want to become an entrepreneur? Stop doing what you are already good at, and start telling people what you will be good at.

Activating your network is key to launching new initiatives, it’s about getting the word out there so people can help. You may need to leave your day job. You may want to do something totally different. You may have a radical idea that no one really understands. But often your biggest supporters have pigeon-holed you already, because they know (the old) you.

Now let’s say you are a graphic designer, and you want people to think of you a sustainability consultant. How do you make the switch? How can you break free and start something really new? This is what Jochem Duyff and I were discussing in a recent working lunch – how can you get people to see you in a different light?

You’ve found it!

The key to a better world…

is just two short words.

My first working lunch with Deepa Paul got me thinking about how challenging it can be to make the most of all the opportunities and really make the shift beyond incremental changes in our lives, businesses, and the world.

As an ambitious human, most often your biggest limitation is yourself. There are so many things you could do, prioritizing your time is essential. You can make to-do lists. But the lists change everyday, new urgencies pop up. Soon you’re buried in incremental steps that leave you looking back after a month or a year, thinking am I ever going to get there?